Strategies for a Rewarding Meeting. Part II: Explaining the Approach.

The process of a creating a website involves many tasks, and you shouldn’t explain them all in detail in your first meeting. Provide the client with a brief, comprehensible overview of the work flow.
The whole process can be divided in three main stages:

Research

Development

Follow up and Analysis

Research

What’s the story? What do we want to tell or sell? Is it a commercial, artistic, or informative web site? Or something in between?
Can we describe our target audience so we can provide them with the right content, look and feel? Do we have the in-house talents to do the copyrighting?
How are others doing? Suggest an analysis of ten of the most important competitors. Study their online presence. What are their strong and weak points? What can we offer that they don’t have? Take your time with your client to find that little extra, or suggest that you will think about it. Be ahead of your competitors. Do not imitate, but try to be the one imitated.

Development

Explain your prototyping work flow. After research is done, you will define a web site structure, draw wireframes for each page, ask for feedback, and refine the wireframes and structure until you are satisfied with your prototype web site on paper. The more effort you put into this stage, the less energy you’ll have to spend in the next stage: programming, which is known as a time-consuming task, and is less flexible than drawing out wireframes. Although it will happen, you want to avoid going back and forth as much as possible.Explain your SEA approach. During all stages – defining the site structure, writing texts, wireframing, design, and programming – you will constantly follow SEA best practices.Read my post, ‘SEA best practices’. Tell your client in brief about SEA – Search Engine Advertising – if appropriate.Read my post ‘SEA basics explained in five minutes’. Inform your client of other existing media channels: Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube. Google shows video results too, and until today this opportunity is often overlooked by the competition. And it’s good for your SEA, too.Printed media: articles and ads can bring more visitors to your web site newsletters.

Follow up and analysis

Give your client an overview of the tools we can use to measure the results of our efforts.
Google Analytics: a free-to-use tool that will give us insight into the number of visitors on our site, the city / country they live in, how they came to our site, what pages they visited …
Conversion: how many people took action on our site; like filling in a contact form, sending an email, subscribing to our newsletter, phoning the company, … Mostly, we are looking for that kind of visitors.
Newsletter analysis: systems like Mailchimp can analyze your e-mail campaigns: How many read the email and who were those people? Did they click through our website and more exactly, to which page? These data can give us important information on the interests of our subscribers.